While it has become accepted that norms can act in institution-like ways, a highly valued norm that has not been examined is free speech. Can free speech be conceptualised as acting in institution-like ways? If it can, what does this illuminate about processes of policy change? I analyse policy change between 2001 and 2011 in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, a period during which significant new limits were introduced on free speech in relation to national security. In addition to showing how free speech acted in institution-like ways, the analysis suggests three implications: norms can both act in institution-like ways and be subject to change in interaction with other institutions; a broad, cultural level institution can mask policy change at the narrow, rule-based level even where the latter contradicts the former; and complexity and variation in speech regulation can be understood as consequences of the to-be-expected variability in the institutionalisation of a norm.

This article builds on previous studies concerning the question of street-level bureaucracy, an expression coined by Lipsky (1980) – Street-Level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russel Sage Foundation) – to highlight the importance of the discretionary power that professionals in public agencies exercise during the implementation of laws, standards and guidelines. Discretion may depend on the need to compromise between the limited resources available and the claims of citizens, or between administrative policy directives and assessments, on the one hand, and their interpretation by “street-level” bureaucrats, on the other. This article focuses on the dilemmas that labour inspectors face when dealing with employment irregularities involving domestic workers. Based on nine months of observations in a local office of the Italian Labour Inspectorate, it aims to understand how labour inspectors make use of their discretionary power when the workplace is the home. This article connects studies of street-level bureaucracy with the new institutional organisational analysis, focusing on the isomorphic pressures from the institutional field in which the labour inspectors operate, together with the manner in which such pressures shape labour inspectors’ discretion. Through this connection, the article aims to extend the scope of both theories.

This article draws on the Programmatic Action Framework (PAF) to tackle the question of how the dominance and decline of a specific policy programme in a policy sector can be explained. It starts from the observation that visionary policy programmes, defined as a set of policy goals and instruments that find their expression in subsequently adopted and interconnected policy reforms, may shape a sector’s policies over several decades. Linking policy programmes to programmatic groups that promote these programmes in search of boosting their careers and authority, the programme’s rising and declining dominance can be explained by the career trajectories of programmatic actors. By displaying empirical evidence for the argument from German health policy, the article shows that proponents of today’s change are opponents of tomorrow’s change since individual careers depend on the dominance of policy programmes.

What leads states to adopt more restrictive labour policies? The conventional wisdom is that unified Republican states, with help from conservative political networks, are more likely to adopt restrictions on labour unions. We argue that party control of government matters but is constrained by voter preferences and the power of organised labour. We create new estimates of state-level public support for unions by income thirds using dynamic multilevel regression and poststratification. Using this measure, we predict the adoption of restrictive labour policies, such as right-to-work and minimum wage preemption laws. We find that Republican governments are less likely to adopt restrictive policies when unions are strong and when union support among middle- and low-income earners is high. Interestingly, these results run contrary to much of the literature on the unequal representation of the wealthy in public policy.

To better understand the impact of deliberations during participatory policymaking events, we introduce and explore the concept of group proximity. An example of such events is citizens’ summits, during which many parallel groups deliberate on solutions for a policy issue. At the summit that was studied, each group followed a value deliberation process with the aim to increase mutual understanding among participants. They were asked to rank the solutions in their order of preference before and after the deliberation. From these rankings, group proximity can be calculated with a rank correlation, enabling a precise comparison of participants’ preferences in each deliberative group. High group proximity indicates very similar rankings in a deliberative group, while low group proximity demonstrates the opposite. Comparing group proximity of the before and after rankings shows if a group ranked convergent, unchanged or divergent. This measure allows for a quantitative analysis of early-stage public policymaking processes.

We analyse United States presidential appointee positions subject to Senate confirmation without a confirmed appointee in office. These “vacant” positions are byproducts of American constitutional design, shaped by the interplay of institutional politics. Using a novel dataset, we analyse appointee vacancies across executive branch departments and single-headed agencies from 1989 to 2013. We develop a theoretical model that uncovers the dynamics of vacancy onset and length. We then specify an empirical model and report results highlighting both position and principal–agent relations as critical to the politics of appointee vacancies. Conditional on high status positions reducing the frequency and duration of vacancies, we find important principal–agent considerations from a separation of powers perspective. Appointee positions in agencies ideologically divergent from the relevant Senate committee chair are vacant for less time than in ideologically proximal agencies. Importantly, this relationship strengthens as agency ideology diverges away from the chair and towards the chair’s party extreme.

Although energy policy used to be a nonpartisan issue in Congress, partisan conflicts over energy policies are intense these days. To examine how a nonpartisan issue became a highly partisan one, we create and use a new measure of energy policy positions of members of Congress. Our analyses of member behaviour show that, in addition to partisan realignment in the South, energy policy-specific factors – rising oil prices, the climate change debate since 1988, and the salience of energy policy in Congress – are significantly related to increasing party polarisation over energy policy. We also find that the increasing convergence between energy policy and environmental policy has significantly contributed to party polarisation over energy issues. The study thus provides important understanding of this specific policy area as well as insights into the party polarisation literature by demonstrating how policy-specific events and policy convergence transform a nonpartisan issue into a highly partisan one.

This article examines the conditions under which interest groups interact with political parties. Existing research finds that interest group–political party interactions in most western democracies have become more open and contingent over time. The close ideological and formal organisational ties that once characterised these relations have gradually been replaced by alternative, more pragmatic forms of cooperation. However, most of this research stresses the importance of the structural factors underpinning these links over time and across countries, but sheds little light on the factors driving short-term interest group–party interactions. Here, by drawing on survey data on Spanish interest groups obtained between December 2016 and May 2017, this article seeks to fill this gap by taking into account party status, issue salience and a group’s resources as explanatory variables. It shows that mainstream parties are the primary targets of interest groups, that groups dealing with salient issues are more likely to contact political parties and that the groups with most resources interact with a larger number of parties.

What are the effects of fiscal imbalances, and austerity, on regional-level spending? To answer this question, we examine an original dataset of yearly spending decisions of regional governments in Italy and Spain between 2003 and 2015. We find that the rise in regional deficits has an important negative effect on regional governments’ spending. The strength of this effect is, however, mitigated by the presence of a left-wing party in regional office. In addition, we uncover an important variation in the extent of cutbacks across policy sectors: regional governments tend to protect the health sector and focus their retrenchment efforts on social assistance and running of public institutions. Partisanship matters here too, as left-wing parties tend to protect healthcare more than their right-wing rivals. These findings bear relevance for understanding the role of partisanship and policy sector in the process of public retrenchment in multi-level states.

In this article, we describe two experiments measuring the impact of a collection of interventions informed by behavioural sciences to reduce unemployment. In a small-scale pilot study (n = 2,383) run in partnership with a Jobcentre in the UK, we found that small changes to the way jobseekers interacted with employment advisers showed promising effects. Based on these findings, we refined our intervention and tested it in a second, larger trial (n = 88,033) across 12 Jobcentres in the UK. We found that our intervention significantly increased off-flow from benefits. These experiments demonstrate that policies and programmes aimed at reducing unemployment can benefit greatly from a deeper understanding of the behaviours of jobseekers and employment advisers. Further, we suggest that this approach could have positive implications for other areas of public policy.

Communities with high levels of social capital enjoy an array of positive economic and community development outcomes. We assess the role of several key community characteristics, including the strength of government institutions, in explaining local social capital variation. The analysis draws on data from United States counties and includes regression modelling and a Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition to explore differences in social capital across an area’s metropolitan status and region. The data show social capital determinants vary by place both due to the endowment levels of these determinants and the productive value of their coefficients. For example, the coefficient productive values of government capacity explain some differences in social capital levels across metropolitan status (but not across region). Concurrently, variations in government capacity endowment levels help explain some differences in social capital levels across region (but not across metropolitan status).

Childcare policies have become an important element of social investment reforms, but in most countries access to childcare has remained socially unequal. Some studies have suggested that a trend towards more gender egalitarian work–family attitudes has facilitated the expansion of childcare provision. Yet, we know little about the repercussions of an unequal expansion of childcare provision on public attitudes towards the work–family nexus. Building on multilevel models of 18 European countries and two waves of the International Social Survey Programme, this analysis examines the effects of an unequal childcare expansion on attitudes towards maternal employment. The results reveal that individuals with lower income remain more skeptical of maternal employment when childcare provision is highly unequal. The unequally distributed benefits of an expansion of childcare provision contribute to a divergence of attitudes across socio-economic groups, which might create a more difficult political terrain for the implementation of expansive social investment reforms.

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the dangers of selective subsidisation, government support to business remains common practice. Looking at State aid allocations in the European Union, the article explores why some countries grant more aid than others. Scholarship has failed to address this issue in a comprehensive manner, focusing either on the responsiveness of governments to voters’ preferences or on the use of subsidies as a way to ensure the political survival of the incumbent. Using the lens of distributive politics, this article proposes a more comprehensive account of State aid politics that joins these two perspectives. By means of time-series cross-section regression analysis, it tests how aid allocation depends on the attainment of policy goals (namely correction of market failures), electoral pragmatism and responsibility towards international commitments. The results show that politicians are indeed electorally pragmatic, but not necessarily responsive, due to institutional constraints and international commitments.

Drawing on a principal–agent framework the article analyses the European Union (EU) politics of delegation in the post-Maastricht era. By means of statistical analysis, it tests the impact of several variables upon the selection of national and supranational agents, as well as on the discretion they enjoy, on the basis of a recently collected data set of EU laws. Findings reveal that pooling and policy complexity favour the involvement of supranational actors in the implementation of EU laws. Moreover, the degree of supranational integration of a policy affects the likelihood of choosing supranational implementers. On the one hand, the Commission enjoys higher discretion vis-à-vis national actors when qualified majority voting applies, and when higher levels of conflict in the Council of Ministers is present. On the other, conflict between the European Parliament and the Council under codecision seems associated with lower supranational discretion, although the result needs further corroboration.

Fiscal decentralisation theory calls for enhanced local revenue and spending responsibilities to promote the efficiency of public service delivery. However, some have pointed to the danger of local capture cancelling out these effects. I examine the argument that organised crime violence (OCV) intensifies as mafias fight for access to local government resources, which they consider an attractive income source. I regress violence on local spending (LS) in Mexican municipalities over the period 1995–2015. I find a significant relationship between LS and the intensity of violence: higher levels of LS per capita are strongly related to higher homicide rates, conditional on them being positive. However, LS does not determine the probability of OCV taking place in the first place. The results suggest that caution should be exercised when initiating decentralisation reforms in the context of local capture and OCV.

Politically motivated interference by politicians, or “politicised enforcement”, is a common cause of enforcement failure in many countries. Existing research on politicised enforcement has focused largely on incentives driven by electoral competition, while fewer studies analysed its mechanisms in an authoritarian context. Drawing on the case of China, this article develops the argument that politicised enforcement can be a consequence of the strategies adopted by authoritarian ruling elites to maintain political survival. Using a panel data set on the enforcement of land laws and regulations, the empirical analysis suggests that the intensity of enforcement correlates with economic performance and patron–client ties between central leaders and local officials, suggesting that political imperatives faced by ruling elites to promote economic growth and carry out clientelistic exchanges affect government decisions on enforcement. Moreover, these correlations remain robust after the implementation of reforms that promoted administrative centralisation within the enforcement agency, suggesting that politicised enforcement reflects the strategic behaviour of the ruling elites of the Party. These findings contribute to the literature on enforcement in authoritarian regimes broadly and in China specifically.

This article studies the political conflict surrounding the implementation of the European Union’s Services Directive in Greece between 2010 and 2018, the period in which the country was subject to external conditionality by external institutions. Focusing on the opening of jurisdictional boundaries for four professions (tourist guides, taxi owners, lawyers and engineers) that differ in terms of power and of organisational structure, we find that power differences, including control of the professions’ institutions of interest aggregation and representation, explain the liberalisation outcomes across the four professions. This article thus puts the spotlight on the role of domestic interest groups in the implementation of EU legislation and directs researchers’ attention to the broader issue of bias in interest intermediation, a classic, but lately understudied, issue in the study of politics.

Left-right partisan conflict has been a key driver of welfare state expansion and retrenchment over time and across countries. Yet, we know very little about how left-right differences in party appeals vary across social policy domains. Why are some issues contentious while there is broad consensus on others? This paper starts from the simple premise that partisan conflict is a function of how popular a certain policy is. Based on this assumption, it argues that the left-right gap should be (1) larger for revenue-side issues than for expenditure-side issues, (2) larger for policies targeted at groups that are viewed as less deserving and (3) larger for more redistributive programs than less redistributive ones (e.g. means-tested versus earnings-related benefits). These expectations are tested on fine-grained policy data coded from 65 Austrian party manifestos issued between 1970 and 2017 (N = 18,219). The analysis strongly supports the revenue–expenditure hypothesis and the deservingness hypothesis, but not the redistribution hypothesis.

The literature has described trade unions’ positions towards both precarious workers and migrant workers as ambivalent. By studying an extreme case, the meat-processing industries in the United Kingdom and in Germany, we show how trade unions were decisive in both countries in bringing exploitative working conditions on the political agenda and in advancing policy change. However, the strategies through which trade unions contributed to this differed remarkably, highlighting different causal pathways in both countries. The British case can clearly be seen as an example of successful union revitalisation by relying on innovative strategies. In contrast, the German story exhibits a strong reliance on a more traditional approach to improving workers’ rights, which was only successful after employers were willing to improve working conditions in the sector as well. Our analysis shows that policy change can happen despite unfavourable conditions and weak actors, especially if these actors make strategic use of situational conditions.

How much do politics and politically sensitive policy choices matter for sovereign credit ratings? We contend that while policy is consistently important for rating decisions, attention to politics varies with perceived uncertainty. Quantitatively analysing the text of 635 sovereign rating reports issued by Standard and Poor’s (S&P) between 1999 and 2012 for 40 European countries, we find that S&P scrutinises policy with similar intensity across countries, but political scrutiny was less intense in developed countries and prospective European Union members (categories formerly associated with lower uncertainty) than in emerging countries until the crisis dispelled illusions of lower uncertainty in these categories. Our findings nuance the common notion that financial market actors allow countries perceived to belong to low-risk categories more “room-to-move” in their political and policy choices, by showing that in rating decisions such permissiveness only applied to politics – but not to policy – and it ended with the global financial crisis.